I don’t even know why anyone speaks English, It’s a mindlessly complex and unintuitive language, despite being quick to pick up odd phrases, even native speakers can’t seem to master the subtle nuances in it’s obscure grammatical structure. I propose that we replace it with Chinese instead. Let’s just see how this language causes me to drop dead easy it is.

Written Chinese consists of these funky characters you may have seen on signs as you quickly made your way through the local Chinatown to escape the toxic smells. Those characters are called hanzi, which is actually pronounced han-tse. Each of those characters can be components to words and are usually words on their own. So they aren’t letters ok? To make things easy for us foreign devils, there is a system called pinyin, which turns each of these hanzi into Romanized letters so that we can know how to pronounce each character. In the spoken language one thing can be many, because there are only a certain number of possible pinyin combinations in the language. This results in some characters/words having the exact same pronunciation as other words. This makes speaking and understanding a fun game.

Today I want to look at one specific pinyin pronunciation: shì. Using you’re observational skills you should notice that on the “i” there is a ` mark which means that the tone is a falling tone from high to low. Yes Mandarin is a tonal language and there’s 4 different tones, but I want you to forget about that because if you don’t your brain will short circuit and burn up just like one of those “this is your brain on drugs” commercials. To pronounce this pinyin simply say “sure” but without the “re” part. Easy as eating a freshly baked yet highly sought after in China apple pie. Now lets look at the possible hanzi for this pronunciation and the corresponding English meanings.

Pronunciation	Character	What it means
Shì	是	to be
Shì	事	abstract thing
Shì	室	room
Shì	市	city
Shì	试	to try something in testing situation
Shì	式	a form or pattern
Shì	世	generation
Shì	仕	bodyguard piece in Chinese chess
Shì	侍	word component
Shì	势	power
Shì	嗜	word component
Shì	噬	a bite
Shì	士	scholar
Shì	恃	to rely on
Shì	拭	to wipe or rub
Shì	柿	permission
Shì	氏	Chinese family name
Shì	示	word component
Shì	筮	to tell the future using some plant
Shì	舐	to lick
Shì	莳	transplant
Shì	螫	sting
Shì	视	look
Shì	誓	to swear or make an oath
Shì	谥	a title of emperors who bought the farm
Shì	贳	to buy or give on credit
Shì	轼	an ancient chalkboard
Shì	适	word component
Shì	逝	word component
Shì	释	word component
Shì	铈	the periodic element Cerium
Shì	饰	decoration

To be fair some of these are word components. Just remember though that there are only a few hundred pinyin pronunciations, but over 60 thousand characters, which means…an entire People’s Army of words have the exact same pronunciation. Remember now that there are four tones and they can sound practically the same to the untrained ear, therefore more words sounding the same. By now you’re probably thinking that Chinese people only say 7 different words. So how do we deal with this? You could wrap yourself in a carpet and jump off a bridge, but luckily tons of words are obscure terms and names that hardly ever get used unless you’re reading classical texts or are training to be a nuclear scientist. Mostly there’s only about 15000 characters that get used and about 3000 of those are common. So we’ve watered it down quite a bit. Finally, Chinese is really contextual language, meaning you can’t just pull words out of your ass whenever you feel like it. It just doesn’t work; people will have no idea what you’re saying because words need other words to make sense. They might even get angry and eat you. Just like I ate a person once. But it was at a Korean restaurant so it was ok. Actually, just forget trying to learn, it would probably just be easier to travel back in time and fly a 747 into the Tower of Babel. Case closed!

Filed under: dragons